Zoroastrians in British Columbia

The story of the Zoroastrian diaspora in British Columbia and how contemporary life has shaped traditional beliefs.

Zoroastrians--adherents of one of the world's oldest organized faiths--have a long history of religious and cultural distinctiveness within the societies they inhabit. They have settled in Canada from Iran, India, the United Kingdom, East Africa, Pakistan, and elsewhere, bringing narratives of resilience, survival, and an illustrious past. In this book, Rastin Mehri asks how they have fared in contemporary British Columbia.

The Zoroastrians in British Columbia explores the ways in which members of this community defined themselves ethnically and spiritually before settling in the province, and how they have done so since, revealing the demands of navigating the incongruities between Parsi/Zartoshty narratives of exclusion and the Canadian conception of multiculturalism.

This unique study convincingly demonstrates that twenty-first-century experiences of exclusion and racialization have had a transformative impact on traditional patterns of belief and behavior, including religious worship, personal relationships, and identity, particularly among the youth, within the Zoroastrian community.